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1978 - "Orientalism"
"The Orient (defined by Said as the Middle East) is not only adjacent to Europe; it is also the place of Europe's greatest and richest and oldest colonies , the sources of its civilisations and languages, its cultural contestant, and one of its deepest and most recurring image of the Other. In addition, the Orient has helped to dfien Europe (or the West) as its contrastive image, idea, personality, experience. Yet none of this Orient is merely imaginative. The Orient is an integral part of European material civilisation and culture. Orientalism expresses and represents that part culturally and even ideologically as a mode of discourse with supporting institutions , vocabulary, scholarship, imagery, doctrines, even colonial bureaucracies and colonial styles. In contrast, the American understanding of the Orient will seem considerably less dense, although our recent Japanese, Korean and Indochinese adventures ought now to be creating a more sober, more realistic 'Oriental' awareness. Moreover the vastly expanded American political and economic role in the Near East (the Middle East) makes great claims on our understanding of that Orient."
"In quite a constant way, Orientalism depends for its strategy on this flexible positional superiority, which puts the Westerner in a whole series of possible relationships with the Orient without ever losing him the upper hand. And why should it have been otherside, especially duringthe period of ectraordinary European ascendancy from the late Renaissance to the present? the scientist, the scholar, the missionary, the trader, or the soldier was in, or thought about, the Orient because he could be there , or could think about it, with very little resistance on the Orient's part. Under the general heading of knowledge of the Orient, and within the umbrella of western hegemony over the Orient during the period from the end of the eighteenth century, there emerged a complex Orient suitable for study in the academy, for display in the museum, for reconstruction in the colonial office, for theoretical illustration in the anthropological, biological, liguitic, racial, and historical theses about mankind and the universe, for instances of economic nd sociological theories of development, revolution, cultural personality, national or religious character. Additionally, the imaginatative examination of things Oriental was based more or less exclusively upon a sovereign Western consciousness out of whose unchallenged centrality in the Oriental worldemerged, first according to general ideas about who or what was an Oriental, then according to a detailed logic governed not simply by empirical reality but by a battery of desires, repressions, investments, and projections . . ." |
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